Crystal-clear

Awaking in the dead of night, I opened my eyes on her disk—silver-white and crystal-clear.

But if the government official upbraids the private citizen for elevating his private affairs to the level of state interests, the private citizen likewise upbraids the official for demeaning the state interests into his private affair, into interests from which all others are excluded as laymen, so that even the crystal-clearest reality seems illusory to him as against the reality embodied in the documents under his nose—which is therefore the official reality, the state reality . . .

To get away from everybody else who’s getting away from it all, it’s a simple matter to head for the northern coast of the Gargano, near the obscure fishing village of Vieste, where a 40-mile-long strand is punctuated at either end by two huge dunes, or travel to the garland of islands that rings Italy’s coast — Elba, Giglio, Ponza, Ischia & Co. — for the country’s freshest fish and crystal-clearest waters.

Growing up in the Caribbean surrounded by some of the most crystal-clear water in the world, I have vivid memories of the fresh smell of earth during the intermittent bouts of rain on an otherwise sunny day.

Silfra is a fissure between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, which are drifting apart at a rate of 2cm each year. And it’s filled with glacial run-off that has been filtered though underground lava for decades and, consequently, is the very crystal-clearest blue – the visibility is about 100m.